The Family Name as Socio-Cultural Feature and Genetic Metaphor: From Concepts to Methods

Abstract

A recent workshop entitled ''The Family Name as Socio-Cultural Feature and Genetic Metaphor: From Concepts to Methods" was held in Paris in December 2010, sponsored by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and by the journal Human Biology. This workshop was intended to foster a debate on questions related to the family names and to compare different multidisciplinary approaches involving geneticists, historians, geographers, sociologists and social anthropologists. This collective paper presents a collection of selected communications.In 1983, Human Biology published a special May issue (volume 55, issue 2) devoted to surnames as tools to evaluate average consanguinity, to assess population isolation and structure, and to estimate the intensity and directionality of migrations. Major contributions written by scholars gave a special relevance to this special issue that remained, for many years, a reference (for a review see Lasker 1985; Colantonio et al. 2011).Since that time, many surname studies have focused on extending knowledge on population structure, isonymy, and migration (for an exhaustive synthesis see Colantonio et al. 2003) been applied to about thirty societies all around the world with a geographic scale that ranges from a household or village, to a whole continent. Further and quite recent research put forward a spectrum of methods to analyze Y-chromosome DNA polymorphisms, thus allowing the examination of the degree of cosegregation of family names and Y-chromosome haplotypes, at least in patrilineal naming practice.The workshop The Family Name as Socio-Cultural Feature and Genetic Metaphor: From Concepts to Methods (Paris, France, 5-6 December, 2010) was organized to go further and, even if some presentations were focused towards more classical research, to pinpoint some particularly innovative aspects of current surname research. This summary article is meant to be a synthesis of the papers presented during the workshop; there are two main strands.The first research direction relies on the use of surname databases that are increasingly exhaustive and easy to analyse thanks to the spread of digital techniques. In this respect, Pablo Mateos, James Cheshire and Paul Longley's UCL Worldnames database (which includes about 6 million surnames registered in 26 different countries, http://worldnames.publicprofiler.org/), constitutes an impressive quantity of information and an exciting tool for future research (Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives in the Spatial Analysis of Names, this article). Unfortunately, this large collection of data comes from different sources, such as national electoral registers or telephone directories, and problems of homogenization and representativeness need to be discussed further as they could not be addressed at the workshop. In the same way, long distance comparisons between stocks of surnames with very different historical and linguistic origins are also a challenge and deserve particular attention. The corpus of family names described by Ka...

Social closure, surnames and crime

“…Crow and Mange (1965) developed the idea that the degree of inbreeding in a population could be calculated from the frequency of isonymous marriage, leading to a stream of population studies (see, e.g., Lasker, 1968;Gottlieb, 1983;Barrai et al, 1999). Studies in anthropology and genetics have found that the distribution of surnames in patrilineal societies is similar to that of the neutral alleles of a gene transmitted only through the Y-chromosome (Yasuda and Morton, 1967;Yasuda and Furusho, 1971;Yasuda et al, 1974;Zei et al, 1983a,b), and indeed to that of any social or cultural trait, which is vertically transmitted from father to children and does not provide an intrinsic reproductive advantage (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 1981;Cavalli-Sforza et al, 2004;Darlu et al, 2012). Crow (1983) states: "Surnames provide a quick, easy, cheap, and crude way to study human inbreeding and migration.…”

General Method to Unravel Ancient Population Structures through Surnames, Final Validation on Italian Data

“…The emigration patterns to other provinces that are mentioned in the Results section (Isolation-by-Distance, Gravity Deformed, and Long Distancesee Figure 5) represent a sandwich of phenomena that took place over four centuries with an unknown tempo, and unfortunately do not provide evidence for back-migration phenomena. We suggest that the Isolation by Distance patterns are the result of population diffusion that took place over a long time and largely correspond to the short migrations associated to marriages (Darlu et al 2012). Differently, the Gravity-Deformed and Long-Distance patterns are probably related to the 20th century's social changes of the country (urbanization, industrialization, abandonment of mountainous and rural areas) and to the advent of mechanized transportation.…”

“…Nevertheless, linguistic differences are insufficient to explain the observed regionalism of polyphyletic surnames, as many of them would be spelled almost in the same way all over the Italian peninsula, what very often does not happen. The fact that their distribution appears to be regional points to more complex socio-demographic and historical dynamics that go beyond the purposes of this paper (for a more general overview of them, see Darlu et al 2012). …”

“…-Franco Battiato, "Scherzo in Minore" (2001) For over 50 years, surname studies have had a long-lasting tradition both in anthropology and population genetics, as they provide a costless and efficient method to describe some aspects of the genetic and demographic variability of populations (for a review of such studies, see Cavalli-Sforza et al 2004 andDarlu et al 2012). More recently and in the frame of molecular studies focused on the variability of the Y-chromosome, the study of surnames gained new prominence and has been advocated to design more careful sampling strategies (Boattini et al 2010;Manni et al 2005).…”

“…More generally, surnames collected from historical records and pedigrees have been used to increase the "archaeogenetic" power of anthropological studies (Bedoya et al 2006;Boattini et al 2011;Bowden et al 2008;Darlu et al 2012;Hill et al 2000;Moore et al 2006;Shlush et al 2008;Zei et al 2003), similarly to the investigations addressing the transmission of Mendelian traits and/or complex diseases in isolated populations (Angius et al 2001;Colonna et al 2007;Mocci et al 2009;Traglia et al 2009). Unfortunately, the analysis of historical records and pedigrees is time-demanding and, besides specific research projects, discourages a wider effort to depict the genetic variability of the past.…”